The Spirit of the Beehive(1973)
dir. Victor Erice
A girl, a monster movie and a silent house.
Where to watch: Subscription: Criterion Channel (7-day free trial, $10.99/mo); rent $5.99 / buy $14.99 on Fandango At Home; disc (JustWatch US, checked 2026-10-25; unSUB agrees on Criterion). Verify.Letterboxd ↗
In a Castilian village in 1940, just after the Spanish Civil War, a travelling cinema shows Frankenstein, and six-year-old Ana asks her sister why the monster killed the little girl. Then she goes looking for him in the fields. A slow, quiet film about a child's imagination in a house where nobody talks, made under Franco's censorship.
Why it’s here
It's a film about a kid trying to make sense of something the adults won't say. What's punk is that it was made under dictatorship and smuggles its grief past the censors. What's pedagogical is Ana: how children take fear and make a story to hold it. Pairs with Pan's Labyrinth (suggested 10-25), The Book Thief and Pedro Paramo. Note: slow, near silent, with a scene of a hunted man and an animal death; not a kids film despite the child protagonist. Spanish with subtitles.
Where This Film Lives
- Topics
- spanish civil war
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